5 ms·

It's artificially capped in software.

dheera 7y ago
That's just wrong. If you own a physical resource, such as a lithium battery, you should be able to use it to its full potential. If they want to sell lower-range cars they should just load them with smaller batteries, and have the upgrade be the battery pack, not the software. Gas cars don't do that. Whatever gas you put in, you can use. These kind of shenanigans only make people love gas cars more, which is honestly not in Tesla's best interest if they want to increase adoption.
- aetherspawn 7y ago
  One reason they may have done this is because there was a time when they were looking at battery swapping. Standard batteries (with just software limiting) between all M3s would make this logistically so much easier.
  - dheera 7y ago
    Logistically fine, but if it makes financial sense to even manufacture and ship full sized batteries to everyone, you might as well let people use them. Otherwise it's purely wasteful, which contradicts their first principles of existence as a company to have unused and will-never-be-used lithium cells being trucked around by thousands of cars the country. Software upgrades should only provide better software, not unlock precious resources that would otherwise be wasted. Also, writing software to deliberately cripple hardware is counterproductive to advancement of technology. It also highly incentivizes people to reverse engineer your system, hack your system, unsubscribe themselves from updates, and IMO they have every right to do so. It would be in your best interest to NOT incentivize this type of behavior. If I buy 5 batteries from you, you have no right to walk into my house, install a safe, and lock up 1 of them for a ransom, which is exactly what they are doing. It's childish at best and unethical at worst. If you did that, I will destroy the safe and recover the 5th battery. It's my property that I purchased and I have the right to use it.
    - aetherspawn 7y ago
      Right, but it’s not like they’re selling and voltage-limiting like a lead acid battery or something like that ... the battery is full of software to measure the discharge current, temperature of every cell, etc. There’s massive engineering complexity in the battery monitoring system. It’s no different to software providing both free and premium versions in the same binary. What are you paying for? Not the number of bytes.. the R&D hours behind it. So for the battery, what are you actually paying for? Not the physical battery, but the capital they had to put into designing the system - a system they designed and determined was cheaper to produce at mass with a standard battery layout and configuration (hence the same voltage range, fuses, battery discharge profile etc) Now if you start messing around with the battery layout then suddenly all your hundreds of sensors, fuses, etc need the ability to achieve remapping and you have to do independent testing, charge profiling etc on the new design.. possibly even design new inverters if you have to change the maximum voltage. So their approach ends up being basic subtraction and scaling on the state of charge. This can be implemented in literally an hour vs. many months and supply chain headache involving hundreds of new PNs. Disclaimer; I design power systems for a Tesla ‘rival’ kinda.
      - rcw4256 7y ago
        > It’s no different to software providing both free and premium versions in the same binary. What are you paying for? Not the number of bytes.. the R&D hours behind it. I think the reason people tolerate this arrangement with software is that they are not actually buying ownership of the IP that this R&D capitalizes; they're buying a license to use that IP. Here, they're purchasing ownership of an actual car. Tesla is actively denying them full use of something that they own.
      - dheera 7y ago
        If it's the same binary I would claim I have the right to crack it. The information is already in my possession, and I fundamentally believe that once a thing is within my private space, I can do anything I want with it within my private space. It's also my freedom to decide how my CPU runs code, including whether or not it listens to certain instructions within the binary. I can build a custom CPU even. Paid software should work like this: - I pay you to tell me a "secret" long binary string that you have spent hours and hours of R&D on - In return for payment, you tell me that binary string that does something useful - I can do whatever I want with that binary string within my private space, except tell other people about it Hence, if there are "features" you don't want me to access for what I paid you, they should not be encoded anywhere in the binary you provide me.
- netsharc 7y ago
  Makes me think of the BMW i3 REX, an electric car with a gasoline engine that generates electricity. It's a hybrid, but to qualify in the US it needs less range on gas than on electric. So what has BMW done? They lessen the gas tank volume in software! Something like, the software will claim it's empty after using 7.2 liters, even though you filled it up with 9 liters.

That's just wrong. If you own a physical resource, such as a lithium battery, you should be able to use it to its full potential. If they want to sell lower-range cars they should just load them with smaller batteries, and have the upgrade be the battery pack, not the software. Gas cars don't do that. Whatever gas you put in, you can use. These kind of shenanigans only make people love gas cars more, which is honestly not in Tesla's best interest if they want to increase adoption.

aetherspawn 7y ago
One reason they may have done this is because there was a time when they were looking at battery swapping. Standard batteries (with just software limiting) between all M3s would make this logistically so much easier.
- dheera 7y ago
  Logistically fine, but if it makes financial sense to even manufacture and ship full sized batteries to everyone, you might as well let people use them. Otherwise it's purely wasteful, which contradicts their first principles of existence as a company to have unused and will-never-be-used lithium cells being trucked around by thousands of cars the country. Software upgrades should only provide better software, not unlock precious resources that would otherwise be wasted. Also, writing software to deliberately cripple hardware is counterproductive to advancement of technology. It also highly incentivizes people to reverse engineer your system, hack your system, unsubscribe themselves from updates, and IMO they have every right to do so. It would be in your best interest to NOT incentivize this type of behavior. If I buy 5 batteries from you, you have no right to walk into my house, install a safe, and lock up 1 of them for a ransom, which is exactly what they are doing. It's childish at best and unethical at worst. If you did that, I will destroy the safe and recover the 5th battery. It's my property that I purchased and I have the right to use it.
  - aetherspawn 7y ago
    Right, but it’s not like they’re selling and voltage-limiting like a lead acid battery or something like that ... the battery is full of software to measure the discharge current, temperature of every cell, etc. There’s massive engineering complexity in the battery monitoring system. It’s no different to software providing both free and premium versions in the same binary. What are you paying for? Not the number of bytes.. the R&D hours behind it. So for the battery, what are you actually paying for? Not the physical battery, but the capital they had to put into designing the system - a system they designed and determined was cheaper to produce at mass with a standard battery layout and configuration (hence the same voltage range, fuses, battery discharge profile etc) Now if you start messing around with the battery layout then suddenly all your hundreds of sensors, fuses, etc need the ability to achieve remapping and you have to do independent testing, charge profiling etc on the new design.. possibly even design new inverters if you have to change the maximum voltage. So their approach ends up being basic subtraction and scaling on the state of charge. This can be implemented in literally an hour vs. many months and supply chain headache involving hundreds of new PNs. Disclaimer; I design power systems for a Tesla ‘rival’ kinda.
    - rcw4256 7y ago
      > It’s no different to software providing both free and premium versions in the same binary. What are you paying for? Not the number of bytes.. the R&D hours behind it. I think the reason people tolerate this arrangement with software is that they are not actually buying ownership of the IP that this R&D capitalizes; they're buying a license to use that IP. Here, they're purchasing ownership of an actual car. Tesla is actively denying them full use of something that they own.
    - dheera 7y ago
      If it's the same binary I would claim I have the right to crack it. The information is already in my possession, and I fundamentally believe that once a thing is within my private space, I can do anything I want with it within my private space. It's also my freedom to decide how my CPU runs code, including whether or not it listens to certain instructions within the binary. I can build a custom CPU even. Paid software should work like this: - I pay you to tell me a "secret" long binary string that you have spent hours and hours of R&D on - In return for payment, you tell me that binary string that does something useful - I can do whatever I want with that binary string within my private space, except tell other people about it Hence, if there are "features" you don't want me to access for what I paid you, they should not be encoded anywhere in the binary you provide me.
netsharc 7y ago
Makes me think of the BMW i3 REX, an electric car with a gasoline engine that generates electricity. It's a hybrid, but to qualify in the US it needs less range on gas than on electric. So what has BMW done? They lessen the gas tank volume in software! Something like, the software will claim it's empty after using 7.2 liters, even though you filled it up with 9 liters.